2025-05-23
Editions that have often been held up as definitive or authortative,
–Brill’s fairly recent critical edition in particular–
take to an almost absurd extreme the nuancing of indications
to represent the reconstructor’s intricate feelings of doubt,
building convoluted bespoke systems of font styling
in an elaborate effort to represent those feelings.
These editions often perform strange things in the main running text:
Elsewhere, Roth quotes 8 attestations of this verse by 6 different authors:
Yet Roth only ends up restoring 5 words, compared to:
These same editions also proceed on the basis of the premise that:
∵ the Church Fathers are our main source and starting point for the reconstruction of Marcion’s scriptures in general;
∴ we can only have verifiable knowledge about a specific chapter, verse, phrase, or word if the Church Fathers attested to it.
I tend to call this mindset “Patristic Cartesianism”.
One might better classify it as Naïve Patristic Verifiability.
Let’s contrast Naïve Patristic Verifiability with Probabilistic Pattern Verifiability.
Data normalization means standardizing all the data in every way:
Pretty please, with sugar on top, make a decision, render the wording, and cleanly encode the variants.
Please, for the love of God, stop making ESPN rankings boards out of your critical editions.
A ten-fold nuanced hierarchy of subjectivity and indecision
serves to stunt scientific progress, not make it.
By comparison, the PTA’s meticulous TEI-XML schema allows for two levels of editorial confidence: two, as in <= 2. They are, to wit: “high” and “low”.
Upload it (closed, open, embargoed–you decide) in an open science repository such as Zenodo, Dataverse, Figshare, HAL, OSF, arXiv, Humanities Commons CORE, or even a University repository.
Most of these provide free DOI minting and MD5 hashes to make datasets identifiable as discrete datasets, ensure file and data integrity, and allow for automated and persistent global link resolution.
Also realize that, however useful Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net might be, they are fundamentally self-managed social media and academic profile platforms, not Open Science repositories.
Because JOHD practices double- and often triple-blind peer-review,
I don’t know who all the reviewers of our team’s datasets have been.
But at least a couple of reviewers (both well-known NAPS members) have disclosed their identities to me.
Blind peer-review is important, but there is broader movement in the scientific and grant-funding communities for open/transparent peer-review.
Peer-review, of course, does not mean endorsement, but simply confirmation that scholarly standards of rigor and research integrity are met.
Since the advent of the Linked Open Data movement,
Ways researchers, faculty, and classes/students can help!
If you would like to help, please reach out to Markus Vinzent and/or Mark Bilby
with your CV and a letter of interest!
Mark G. Bilby: Data Mining Marcion’s Apostolos in Greek – North American Patristics Society – 2025 Annual Meeting